


Visitation

by Smaragdina



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-28
Updated: 2012-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-17 06:24:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It occurs to her, slowly, that she is looking up from the ocean floor. That light and life and daylight are unreachably high above." The night before Corvo returns, she dreams of a storm. (Drabble)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Visitation

Corvo’s ship has been sighted off the coast, they say. Barely a speck of light on the horizon – but it is _there,_ two days early and growing ever closer. By morning it will have docked. By morning she will have news, and he will be home.

He is two days early, and Jessamine cannot shake the fear that he has not come soon _enough_.

She has not yet told Emily. She knows that her daughter would spend the night unsleeping at her window waiting for Corvo if she knew he was coming, all fidgeting limbs and bounces on her toes. Jessamine wishes she could share the excitement. The air in the tower is _tight_. Charged. It is nothing she can put a finger on. The guards are calm and the streets outside are as quiet as one can expect. The tower itself is all but silent. No Spymaster to fuss at the rings on his hands and whine his suspicions of _conspiracy_ into her ear, no High Overseer to harp on deaths that are ordained; they have all gone home. They have taken their plots and their mutterings with them. They have left her here alone – and even though the summer sky is clear, the air that she breathes is the air before a storm.

 _Hurry home_ , she thinks, eyes on the horizon and a tiny point of light that she knows must be there but that she cannot see. _Please hurry home._

She tosses and turns and, as ever, it takes her a long time before she can fall asleep. And she wakes in the middle of the night to the song of thunder in the distance. To the weight of a storm in the sky where once there was a clear and starry night.

She feels the hair rise all over her skin when her feet touch the floor to find that it is covered with a thin sheen of water, no higher than her ankles; that it rolls and pitches under her like the roll of a ship in the distance. Outside, the world is changed. She watches ripples break across the surface of the sky like water. It occurs to her, slowly, that she is looking up from the ocean floor. That light and life and daylight are unreachably high above.

She wonders if this is what drowning is like.

She wonders if it is ever this quiet.

“You won’t ever know, I’m afraid,” says a voice behind her. Jessamine snaps around, hand to her throat and holding back a startled scream. The man who steps out of the air to stand before her has eyes the color of oil on water, and the shadows fall over him loose as nets. She bites down on the urge to step back. “The taste is the same, though,” he continues. “Blood and the sea are so similar.”

“I-I don’t know who you think you are,” she snaps (even though she _does_ , even though the prayer against witchcraft slips through her head and is gone like water through a sieve). “Get out.”

The man nods, once. Tiny incline of  his head. His eyes do not leave hers. She watches him hesitate, slightly, taste the words on the tip of his tongue. “I only wanted to ask – would you prefer I cut in underneath? Slice through the diaphragm and ease you out between your lungs? Or would you rather I saw through the ribs and lift the sternum like a hinge? It’s messier that way, but reaching a hand up inside is rather intimate.”

Outside, thunder cracks along the sky with a sound like breaking bone.

The water lapping at Jessamine’s toes is as cold as ice, as cold as death, and she lifts first one foot and then the other. Her toes are numb. The feeling is beginning to spread over the rest of her skin. Her arms are wrapped around herself, hands on her shoulders, limbs crossed over her heart. “I don’t –” The breath shudders out of her as she reaches for the calm she always falls back on, the way the title of _Empress_ can put steel in her spine. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she manages. “But if you think to threaten me –”

“- Your Lord Protector will arrive in the morning,” he says smoothly. “You trust him?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.” The man touches a toe to the floor as he bows, hands spread, eyes still not breaking from hers. He melts from view as she watches. The whisper of _Empress_ that he leaves her is so soft that it is barely there.

It is almost inaudible over the thunder outside.

The thunder is the sound of wave on rock, of cannonfire, of _fear,_ and Jessamine keeps her back stiff and steel and does not turn to look as the storm breaks behind her. The air is sharp and tight as a whip. The tower trembles under her. The breaths she takes are thin and taste of the sea, salt, almost as pungent and iron as blood, and she shudders and does not _dare_ turn to look out the window outside. She knows, without seeing, that the sky and sea-surface above her is whipped to a froth. Peaks of waves as white as bone. She knows that it is raging violent and unchecked, shaken by a storm that she cannot touch.

It is a long time before she dares to move. It is a long time before she forces her numb feet through the water soaking the floor, before she falls into her bed as if it is the grave.

She remembers nothing when she wakes; and the sky is clear, and the sun is bright, and Corvo’s ship is on the horizon, and there is no sign of a storm at all.


End file.
